Darwin's rival Alfred Russel Wallace recognised at last
It's pretty much accepted that the origin of the theory of natural
selection lies in the writings of Charles Darwin. But it seems the
long-known scientific theory on evolution was itself subject to survival
of the fittest. Experts are now claiming that at least some of the
credit for everything we believe about how species develop should have
gone to someone else.
Alfred Russel Wallace, they say, was the first to write a paper on
the theory, but his efforts were crushed by the greater fame of the
"gentleman naturalist" Darwin.
Dr George Beccaloni, a curator at the Natural History Museum, said:
"Wallace was the one who had the paper ready for publication, and if
he'd sent it directly to a journal it would have been published and
natural selection would have been Wallace's discovery."
The comedian Bill Bailey, who does a stage show about the plight of
Wallace and whose two-part documentary for the BBC is to be shown in
March, puts it more bluntly: "He was robbed - whatever way you look at
it."
Debate over who deserves credit for the theory of evolution has been
re-ignited by the approach of the 100th anniversary of Wallace's death.
The unveiling on Thursday by Bailey of a portrait of the Welsh-born
scientist at the Natural History Museum in London opens a year-long
celebration of Wallace's life and work.
Dr Beccaloni said there was no better time to recognise that, while
Darwin had been working on the theory of natural selection for many
years, Wallace had also been toiling away on the same idea. The two men
made breakthroughs independently but Wallace was the first to write an
explanation down in an essay. According to Dr Beccaloni, however,
Wallace's mistake was sending the essay from Indonesia -where he had
been researching for eight years - to Darwin, in the course of a
correspondence between the two men.
The curator says Wallace had no idea his scientific pen pal been
working on the same theory. And Darwin was apparently "horrified" when
he received the paper, and immediately passed it on to his friends, two
of Victorian England's most eminent scientists, Sir Charles Lyell and Dr
Joseph Hooker.
The two then decided to release a joint paper containing the essay
and excerpts from the writings of the much more famous and respected
Darwin on natural selection. But Dr Beccaloni says their crime was that
they did this without Wallace's knowledge.
In a letter to the German anthropologist A B Meyer in 1869, Wallace
himself bears out this claim: "I sat down, wrote out the article, copied
it, and sent it off by the next post to Mr Darwin. It was printed
without my knowledge, and of course without any correction of proofs."
Dr Beccaloni said the actions of Lyell and Hooker were "pretty
morally reprehensible".
Darwin's seminal On the Origin of Species was published 15 months
later, in November 1859, cementing his place in history. But Bailey
says: "If Wallace had not sent it to Darwin and [instead] sent it to a
scientific journal, then he would have had priority and we would be
talking about Wallaceism, not Darwinism."
- The Independent
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